[License-review] Request for Legacy Approval: Unicode Data Files and Software License

[Richard Fontana]

A mere change in the copyright year is considered immaterial for
purposes of SPDX (for its notion of license text matching). That should
also be true of OSI approval though I think the appropriate thing to do,
should this license be approved, would be to templatize the date (as has
been done with certain OSI-approved licenses, though I can think of one
legacy-approval license where this wasn't done -- eCos 2.0). 

Regarding the last paragraph: I am not sure if Bruce is suggesting that
this paragraph ought to render the license non-open-source, or if he
sees it as acceptable but poorly drafted or considered. FWIW I did not
read it as a blanket prohibition on mentioning "Unicode" in an
advertisement. I see it as equivalent to the following clause in the
3-clause BSD license:

"Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its
contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from
this software without specific prior written permission."

The Unicode license clause is:

"Except as contained in this notice, the name of a copyright holder
shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale,
use or other dealings in these Data Files or Software without prior
written authorization of the copyright holder."

Richard




On Thu, Nov 30, 2017, at 01:27 PM, Sascha Brawer wrote:
> Perhaps Unicode-DFS-2015 could be classified as “superseded” by Unicode-DFS-2016?
> 
> The difference between https://spdx.org/licenses/Unicode-DFS-2016.html and https://unicode.org/copyright.html#License is a change from “Copyright © 1991-2016” to “Copyright © 1991-2017”, otherwise they’s been no change. So, Unicode-DFS-2016 is still current. (If a change in copyright year has any implications for OSI or SPDX, it would be good to know.)
> 
> About the last paragraph, we’ll check within Unicode what the intention was behind the wording, and then circle back to the list. (Would it matter for the OSI classification?)
> 
> — Sascha
> 
> 2017-11-30 6:11 GMT+01:00 Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com>:
>> I understand these are legacy licenses. There is what appears to be an interesting complication in the text:
>> 
>>> *Except as contained in this notice, the name of a copyright holder shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in these Data Files or Software without prior written authorization of the copyright holder.*
>>> **
>> The protected copyright holder's name is "Unicode, Inc." If we consider that "Unicode" alone is also the protected name of the copyright holder, this would appear to prohibit anyone from stating in advertising that their product is compatible with Unicode. Certainly this is not what you want.
>> 
>> We were just talking about trademark restrictions in Open Source licenses earlier today. Note my email at https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2017-November/003299.html
>> My advice applies just as well to this example.
>> 
>>     Thanks
>> 
>>     Bruce
>> 
>> On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Richard Fontana <richard.evan.fontana at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> https://spdx.org/licenses/Unicode-DFS-2016.html
>>>  https://spdx.org/licenses/Unicode-DFS-2015.html
>> 
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